Jeff Mizanskey, now 62, was arrested during an undercover drug bust in Sedalia in 1993. He was sentenced in 1996 under the state’s Prior and Persistent Drug Offender Law, which is a three-strike system.

At the time of Mizanskey’s arrest, police were after a drug dealer who hired two men to smuggled more than 100 pounds of marijuana across state lines. When police followed the smugglers to a hotel where the dealer was, they found Mizanskey, who already had two strikes on his record. The third gave him life without parole.